[1.09q] First Two Hours - Impressions

from Elemental Forums

Holy Stable interface Batman! I played for two hours and the only crashes I got were totally unrelated to game play.

 

I would say at this point, you guys are pretty close to having the core of the game dialed in; now for the tweaks.

 

Notable Points of my experience with 1.09q thus far;

 

Starting with 5 Materials - Huge help. Only one turn of unavoidable down time in city development while I waited for a fifth population on turn 4. Thank you.

 

Pop Up Windows - I like the pop-ups. I kinda wish that there was some slightly more overt indications along the side bar when one of a city's queues becomes stagnant. Now, despite liking the mechanic, the pop ups don't wait for one another. You find out a city needs attention, then immediately get whisked away to select your next spell. I'm sure you guys know about this and are planning to fix it, but it's worthy of mention because it makes me want to punch babies.

 

"Free" Attacks in tactical combat - I you are a space away from your opponent and click to attack them rather than move into the adjacent space, you get the move and the attack both for 1 movement point. Not sure if this is intentional, but it happens every time.

Other Combat Stuff - The new armor ratings seems to be relatively in line. I'm still early game, but the hit/damage/soak ratio seems pretty solid so far.

 

Monster Aggression - I like the wandering monsters. I like that they are bold and attack you now. This most recent game, however, I had a bandit, two wolves individually, and a wolf and a bear come wandering over the hillside to explicitly attack my capital city. Four attacks by Winter of 164. It may be that was a "perfect storm" as it were, but it damn near cost me my game. How far out (spatially) are these monsters making the decisions to attack? It seemed as though they were literally coming from 7-8-9 tiles away with the express purpose of chewing on my little villager's feet.

 

Magic Spell Tweaks I like new Alchemy. Haven't used it, and haven't needed to now that markets work, but I like it none the less. Spells seem to be applying damage properly, and overall working as advertised (admittedly, I've not opened all the good books or researched to level 10 yet either). We still need some more flavor in the spell selection. I still think that researching new spell levels is ridiculous. However, we are really starting to get there in this department.

 

 

Thank you Stardock Development Team, named and unnamed, for all of your hard work. Your dedication to us as players continues to shine through in each of these massive improvements that you make to our game. I hold great hope that by next summer, E:WoM is going to be the game that I'm wishing someone would make a new one of for another decade.

elemental
9,599 views 11 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Indeed, things are running a lot more smoothly. Each new patch is a major improvement over the previous!

One major issue was brought up by jpmcconnell in the Elemental Ideas forum that I really think needs immediate addressing. His OP can be found here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/401663

Basically, he points out that the speed of production does not differ at all between cities of different size. Considering that you can create an outpost right by your enemies and begin to produce soldiers/buildings just as quickly as you could in your capital bears serious consideration. Jpmcconnell provides some solutions for this in his post.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Pop Up Windows - I like the pop-ups. I kinda wish that there was some slightly more overt indications along the side bar when one of a city's queues becomes stagnant. Now, despite liking the mechanic, the pop ups don't wait for one another. You find out a city needs attention, then immediately get whisked away to select your next spell. I'm sure you guys know about this and are planning to fix it, but it's worthy of mention because it makes me want to punch babies.
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I completely agree with this, and I think a lot of the community does too. As the core mechanics all get worked out and become much more interesting to use, this is one part that still seems kind of wacky. Recently, I was talking with Cari_Elf and she said that most of the devs have taken to simply turning off the "Nothing Building" pop up. In general, pop ups can be hard to deal with as they tend to take over the system until they have been dealt with. I think in general the devs should probably think about creating a creating some kind of dialog queue which holds all the dialogs which have requested to be shown by the system. The trick here would be that the dialog queue only spits out a dialog box once the game has returned to its "wait" state on the strategic map. This way, the user is shown only one system generated dialog at a time and can use those to navigate to the various other dialogs which to give his/her inputs. The end result would be something more like civ 4 where the user spends some time at the beginning of each turn dealing with the various parts of the game require their attention. Yet unlike civ 4, the number of dialogs would be minimized by the user selecting to not view the "nothing building" pop up, which can become the most viewed dialog.

Other Combat Stuff - The new armor ratings seems to be relatively in line. I'm still early game, but the hit/damage/soak ratio seems pretty solid so far.
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I completely agree, though running into wolves with 46 hit points or a group of like 12 monster units ( I had saw one with bandits, spiders, wolves, and darklings ) makes the early game pretty frightening.

Basically, he points out that the speed of production does not differ at all between cities of different size. Considering that you can create an outpost right by your enemies and begin to produce soldiers/buildings just as quickly as you could in your capital bears serious consideration. Jpmcconnell provides some solutions for this in his post.
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After 1.09n came out, I brought a very similar point to Cari_Elf. However, in that conversation, the problem I felt was one of global population v. local population. Currently, one can build up a great amount of population in his/her core cities and simply move a pioneer behind a war party to set up a unit producing city on the border of another faction. While this city would not be able to build parties of troops, it could be used to build single harassment troops capable of attacking any weaker cities or caravans. Assuming this user can take a level 3 city, the unit producing outpost can be dismantled and the new city can now start pumping out parties which are also fueled by large core populations and the new populations stolen from your opponents. This type of strategy is one of many which are only possible using a global resource system. In general, using a global resource system makes some game mechanics easy to manage and easy to maintain, yet at the same time, this kind of system tends to weaken city specialization as a resource production of a city can become more important that the city itself.

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

 

Pop Up Windows - I like the pop-ups. I kinda wish that there was some slightly more overt indications along the side bar when one of a city's queues becomes stagnant. Now, despite liking the mechanic, the pop ups don't wait for one another. You find out a city needs attention, then immediately get whisked away to select your next spell. I'm sure you guys know about this and are planning to fix it, but it's worthy of mention because it makes me want to punch babies.

 

Completely agree with this. Hate to compare with Civ 5, but I think they have arrived on a very good system for dealing with various alerts that's non-intrusive, but also does a good job of bringing things to your attention. For anyone who hasn't played it yet: basically at the beginning of the turn a series of alerts icons pop up on one side of screen with a brief bit of text outlining what it is and why you should care. Each type of event has a different icon: one for city production, one for enemy sited near city, one for research complete, etc. You can click on them to dismiss them or address them in some way. Anything absolutely requiring your attention must be addressed before you hit end turn again. It allows to focus on something you were working on previously, or look at a bunch of other variables, before being forced to chose your city production or next research area. Lots of other complaints with Civ 5, but this mechanic works pretty well. Something similar for elemental would be nice.

 

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

This may be the smoothest release yet. 2 hours, and while it's not been totally bug free, no crashes that I can't avoid, the monsters aren't too insane, and all the questing stuff seems mostly sorted out.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

- Cloak of Thwarting: Probably useless in the late game, because Accuracy scales with the level

- Sword of Wraith: 65 Attack is overpowered and makes the Strength bonus useless

- Arielle's Shield: Nice item

- Shield of the Sovereign: Probably useless in the late game, because Accuracy scales with the level

- Yithril Bow: Probably useless in the late game, because it can not penetrate the armor

Please balance the Attack, Defense, Accuracy, Dodge and Spell Resistance first before you add items that demonstrate how unbalanced the combat is. The Attack and Defense values are too high and the Defense should always be lower than the Attack of the same tech level. Dodge and Spell Resistance are only useful at the early game, because the Accuracy scales with the level. Shields should increase Dodge and not the Defense.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Monster Aggression - I like the wandering monsters. I like that they are bold and attack you now. This most recent game, however, I had a bandit, two wolves individually, and a wolf and a bear come wandering over the hillside to explicitly attack my capital city. Four attacks by Winter of 164. It may be that was a "perfect storm" as it were, but it damn near cost me my game. How far out (spatially) are these monsters making the decisions to attack? It seemed as though they were literally coming from 7-8-9 tiles away with the express purpose of chewing on my little villager's feet.
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I had a game where a darkling traveled a long distance to attack a new village.  It actually pathed around my capitol to get to the village and crossed the entire range of my domain.  A wolf was in spotting distance of the village, however it was not strong enough for the unit guarding the town....  The darkling, however, was, and the new town was sacked.  Since then, I have decided to treat all of the NPC creatures as if they communicate with one another and treat them much more seriously now.

Top

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

I feel it adds alot to the atmosphere with the monsters being like they are now. Afterall why would your people follow you if they could quite happily protect themselves?

 

Does anybody have any comments on the stability of the new build?

I got a crash every hour or so in 1.09p and i'm wondering if that's been improved upon much.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

-The 5 materials at the start of the game are a huge improvement. You can even produce a couple early soldiers now if you so choose !

-I love the current monster system. Yes, early game is tough, but that's even better. It brings a natural selection: who's going to expand the most despite being under constant attack by barbarian tribes ?

-I still dislike the resource spawning system, but well... okay, it's not gonna change in 1.1 anyway.

-I agree with the sword of wrath not being a good item. Its attack is overpowered, its drawback is too extreme. Two wrongs don't make a right here, and I'd rather see a 50 damage item with a 5 constitution penality (and the great scimitar at 45). Right now, if I see someone with a sword of wrather, I'll just bombard the dude with (2) spells to take him off. Had he arrived in the melee... well, he'd have one-hit-killed everyone :p, because it's still early-mid game. I like the idea of a powerful weapon with drawbacks, but that's just too much.

-Overall, the combat values are much better, though a few weapons are in need of (a bit of) love. Short sword, I'm looking at you. As I said on the changelog thread, a very small boost to mace and broadsword would also be perfect. 

-There are still a few bugs (the action points bug where you can move to an enemy and hit him and the 2 last action points for moving through the last square won't be used).

-Some spells need of rebalance. I mean... almost all the single target combat spells aside from arcane arrow. With 20 intelligence, I don't need any other spell. The others do the same think, except weaker. This might be due to one scaling with Int, and the others not.

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting CHiZZoPs, reply 1
Basically, he points out that the speed of production does not differ at all between cities of different size. Considering that you can create an outpost right by your enemies and begin to produce soldiers/buildings just as quickly as you could in your capital bears serious consideration. Jpmcconnell provides some solutions for this in his post.
End of CHiZZoPs's quote

 

I saw that thread last night, and agree pretty much entirely with it. I was actually going to do a little bit of close observation on the cities stuff in the next few days to see specifically what is out there. I didn't have time to craft a decent response at the time, but you can be sure I'll be in there popping off my mouth at some point today.

Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top

Havent managed to play 1.09q quite yet (current status: 2% of 1.9 GB downloaded, I managed to un-install elemental somehow, and Impulse wont restore the old archives), but there was a strange thing in 1.09p. Somewhere just outside the influence zone of a neutral empire, there seems to spawn an entire 2-3 level city worth (about 16 x 16 tiles full) of quest goodies. I set my sovereign and a hired champ loose on them, cleared every one of them, received countless +1 to attack, def, charisma, etc, and after some turns, the goodies re-spawned in the exact same location.. (except maybe level 4 and above locations)

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top

Wow I actually beat a game without a single crash! Great work Stardock. Guess I will have to talk about balance since i have no stability issues.

Monster bug is not fixed! Monsters still stop spawning mid game. This is my biggest issue by far.

Materials are the non bug thing that bothers me the most when i played. All you need to do is build one or two workshops off the start then get production. After building the Great Mill you never have to worry about materials again. This doesn't sit well with me. Workshops are your factories. In real life the more mining and even researching you do the more you need factories to support them. As it stands materials are a early game only resource. In another thread Keneta suggested adding a material cost to some late game buildings, and I have to agree. Late game all I do is spam libraries. Adding a .5 0r .25 material upkeep to them would really help diversify late game. Would force me to keep upgrading a city specialized in material production. Other buildings like mines could maybe use a small material upkeep as well. The other problem with materials is that the Great Mill is way to good, it gives 24 materials and boosts workshops %100. This needs toned down to around 9 and %50.

Crystals are kinda the same way. Never really saw the need to actually research them. Just not a priority. Perhaps add a small crystal cost to temples of essence or other late game magical buildings.

I think doing this would greatly improve the economy in Elemental. Which as it stands tends to stagnate late game.